Bobby Bridger (born Robert Durham in Columbia, Louisiana March 14, 1945) is a singer/songwriter/poet/actor/playwright/author and painter who for five decades has traveled the globe performing a trilogy of one man shows for audiences in America, Canada, Europe, Australia and Russia. He has recorded numerous albums for labels including Monument Records, RCA and Golden Egg Records. On television he appeared twice (1976 [1] and 1978 [2] ) on the early years of PBS's "Austin City Limits", on American Experience on PBS, and on ABC's "Good Morning America", A & E and C-SPAN, as well as on NPR on radio. He is the composer of "Heal In The Wisdom", the official anthem of the Kerrville Folk Festival for over 40 years. In April, 1988 Bridger sang "Heal in the Wisdom" to close the first "GlobalForum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders on Human Survival" at Christ Church, Oxford, England.
Bridger has been an artist-in-residence at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, WY., the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, CT, the John G. Neihardt Center in Bancroft, NE and Yellowstone National Park. Bridger starred in Dale Wasserman's groundbreaking musical, Shakespeare and The Indians and was featured with David Carradine and Will Sampson in the drama Black Elk Speaks. Full company productions of Bridger's Seekers of the Fleece ran for eight consecutive summer seasons in Wyoming. He is the author of the award-winning book, Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull: Inventing The Wild West ( ISBN 978-0-292-70917-1), Bridger also recorded an audiobook of "Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull: Inventing the Wild West", An Autobiography, Bridger ( ISBN 978-0-292-71904-0), Where theTall Grass Grows ( ISBN 978-1-55591-454-7), and [[A Ballad of the West]] and contributed essays to anthologies on western icons Frank Waters and John G. Neihardt as, ell as numerous magazine and newspaper features. He is the subject of the documentary film "Quest Of An Epic Balladeer" and a DVD production of live performances of his trilogy of one man shows was released in 2005. He is the 2016 recipient of the John G. Neihardt Foundation's prestigious "Word Sender" Award. In 2019 Bridger produced an audiobook of Vine Deloria Jr.'s classic, The World We Used to Live In: Remembering the Powers of the Medicine Men. He also produced an audiobook of Vine Deloria, Jr.'s classic, "God Is Red". In December, 2022 The Northeast Louisiana Music Trail Association installed a historical marker in Columbia, Louisiana honoring Bridger's contributions to music, literature, and theater.
Bobby Bridger, Bridger (University of Texas Press 2009), ISBN 978-0-292-71904-0
Heȟáka Sápa, commonly known as Black Elk, was a wičháša wakȟáŋ and heyoka of the Oglala Lakota people. He was a second cousin of the war leader Crazy Horse and fought with him in the Battle of Little Bighorn. He survived the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. He toured and performed in Europe as part of Buffalo Bill's Wild West.
Clifton Chenier, was an American musician known as a pioneer of zydeco, a style of music that arose from Creole music, with R&B, blues, and Cajun influences. He sang and played the accordion. Chenier won a Grammy Award in 1983.
John Gneisenau Neihardt was an American writer and poet, amateur historian and ethnographer. Born at the end of the American settlement of the Plains, he became interested in the lives of those who had been a part of the European-American migration, as well as the Indigenous peoples whom they had displaced.
Indian country is any of the many self-governing Native American/American Indian communities throughout the United States. As a legal category, it includes "all land within the limits of any Indian reservation", "all dependent Indian communities within the borders of the United States", and "all Indian allotments, the Indian titles to which have not been extinguished."
The terms underground press or clandestine press refer to periodicals and publications that are produced without official approval, illegally or against the wishes of a dominant group. In specific recent Asian, American and Western European context, the term "underground press" has most frequently been employed to refer to the independently published and distributed underground papers associated with the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s in India and Bangladesh in Asia, in the United States and Canada in North America, and the United Kingdom and other western nations. It can also refer to the newspapers produced independently in repressive regimes. In German occupied Europe, for example, a thriving underground press operated, usually in association with the Resistance. Other notable examples include the samizdat and bibuła, which operated in the Soviet Union and Poland respectively, during the Cold War.
Liberation News Service (LNS) was a New Left, anti-war underground press news agency that distributed news bulletins and photographs to hundreds of subscribing underground, alternative and radical newspapers from 1967 to 1981. Considered the "Associated Press" for the underground press, at its zenith the LNS served more than 500 papers. Founded in Washington, D.C., it operated out of New York City for most of its existence.
Black Elk Speaks is a 1932 book by John G. Neihardt, an American poet and writer, who relates the story of Black Elk, an Oglala Lakota medicine man. Black Elk spoke in Lakota and Black Elk's son, Ben Black Elk, who was present during the talks, translated his father's words into English. Neihardt made notes during these talks which he later used as the basis for his book.
Ella Cara Deloria, also called Aŋpétu Wašté Wiŋ, was a Yankton Dakota (Sioux) educator, anthropologist, ethnographer, linguist, and novelist. She recorded Native American oral history and contributed to the study of Native American languages. According to Cotera (2008), Deloria was "a pre-eminent expert on Dakota/Lakota/Nakota cultural religious, and linguistic practices." In the 1940s, Deloria wrote the novel Waterlily, which was published in 1988 and republished in 2009.
Vine Victor Deloria Jr. was an author, theologian, historian, and activist for Native American rights. He was widely known for his book Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), which helped attract national attention to Native American issues in the same year as the Alcatraz-Red Power Movement. From 1964 to 1967, he served as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, increasing its membership of tribes from 19 to 156. Beginning in 1977, he was a board member of the National Museum of the American Indian, which now has buildings in both New York City and in Washington, DC, on the Mall.
A Ballad of the West is a three-part story by Bobby Bridger told in Homeric verse and song about the Mountain Men, William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody, and the Lakota Sioux people inspired by John G. Neihardt's A Cycle of the West.
Phillip Jackson, best known as Norton Buffalo, was an American singer-songwriter, country and blues harmonica player, record producer, bandleader and recording artist who was a versatile proponent of the harmonica, including chromatic and diatonic.
The Rag was an underground newspaper published in Austin, Texas from 1966–1977. The weekly paper covered political and cultural topics that the conventional press ignored, such as the growing antiwar movement, the sexual revolution, gay liberation, and drug culture. It encouraged these political constituencies and countercultural communities to coalesce into a significant political force in Austin. As the sixth member of the Underground Press Syndicate and the first underground paper in the South, The Rag helped shape a flourishing national underground press.
Catherine Ponder is an American minister and founder of Unity Church Worldwide, affiliated with the Unity Church, and author of several New Thought books on mainly focused on the theme of prosperity.
Gary John Dorrien is an American social ethicist and theologian. He is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York and Professor of Religion at Columbia University, both in New York City, and the author of 18 books on ethics, social theory, philosophy, theology, politics, and intellectual history.
Jesse Sublett is a musician, writer, and visual artist from Austin, Texas. As a musician, he is best known for his long-running rock trio, The Skunks. His essays and journalism have appeared in a wide range of publications, and he is also known for his mystery novels featuring a bass-playing sleuth named Martin Fender.
Thorne Webb Dreyer is an American writer, editor, publisher, and political activist who played a major role in the 1960s-1970s counterculture, New Left, and underground press movements. Dreyer now lives in Austin, Texas, where he edits the progressive internet news magazine, The Rag Blog, hosts Rag Radio on KOOP 91.7-FM, and is a director of the New Journalism Project.
Lillia Lavell "Lavelle" White is an American Texas blues and soul blues singer and songwriter. After performing most of her adult lifetime, White released three albums, the first of which was issued in 1994, when she was aged 65.
Guy Forsyth is an American blues rock singer and songwriter.
Wocekiye is a Lakota language term meaning "to call on for aid," "to pray," and "to claim relationship with". It refers to a practice among Lakota people engaged in both the traditional Lakota religion as well as forms of Christianity.
The Willie Nelson statue, or simply Willie, is a bronze sculpture of singer-songwriter Willie Nelson, located in Downtown Austin, Texas. The statue was commissioned to artist Clete Shields by the nonprofit organization Capital Area Statues.